Trivia / Allan Sherman

• Died During Production: Warner (Bros.) Records gave Sherman a greenlight for a comedy album about golf he proposed to them in late 1973, and he was working on pre-production for it the day he died.
• Follow the Leader:
  • The parodies Sherman did for Jubilee Records in 1951 were obviously piggybacking on the success of bandleader Mickey Katz (father of Joel Grey, grandfather of Jennifer Grey), an associate of Spike Jones who'd carved out a profitable niche doing Jewish-themed parodies.
  • Christine Nelson, who did the female voice on "Sarah Jackman", recorded the album Did'ja Come To Play Cards Or To Talk? in 1966, where she's obviously a Distaff Counterpart to Sherman, doing parodies in front of a live audience, and Lou Busch, who'd arranged Sherman's early albums, also did the arrangements for Nelson's album. One song, "Marvin" ("you're a rotten kid", to the tune of "Funiculi, Funicula"^note Which Sherman himself had already parodied as "America's a Nice Italian Name".) became a longstanding favorite on Dr. Demento's radio show.
  • Dickie Goodman, the inventor of the "break-in" record (fake interviews with the "answers" being snippets of hit songs, with "Flying Saucer" in 1956 and "Mr. Jaws" in 1975 becoming Top 10 hits), did a Creator's Oddball with the album My Son, The Joke in 1964, which was pitched somewhere between The Mockbuster, Spoofing Spoofiness and a Bawdy Song collection, starting with a cover photo that's an obvious parody/homage of My Son, The Folk Singer's cover photo (Goodman standing on a crate playing a guitar with his "mother" close by). The Goodman album features off-color sexual-themed parodies of various public domain songs that Sherman didn't get around to parodying on the My Son... albums, plus a parody of "Sarah Jackman" (which, of course, was already a parody of "Frere Jacques") called "Harry's Jockstrap", which also became a Dr. Demento staple in later years.
• He Also Did: Besides his voicing of the title character in the 1971 The Cat in the Hat special, Sherman made three on-camera acting appearances in his career: guest appearances on the TV shows The Loner (as a bumbling sheriff in The Wild West), Mr. Novak (as a Jazz bandleader), and his only film appearance, as a goateed, high-strung, gluttonous One-Scene Wonder taxi passenger in the obscure 1972 comedy Wacky Taxi (aka Pepper and His Wacky Taxi), a cheesy, ultra-low-budget starring vehicle for John Astin.
• Hitless Hit Album: My Son, The Folk Singer and My Son, The Celebrity both hit #1 on the Billboard album chart without any formal singles released. "Sarah Jackman" from Folk Singer got a fair amount of Top 40 radio play as an album cut (becoming a big regional hit in Washington, DC and Boston) and ended up receiving a special promo release as a single, while "Harvey and Sheila" from Celebrity also got some radio spins.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: My Son, The Box from 2005 collected almost all of Sherman's recorded material from The '60s, including outtakes and rarities, on a 6-CD set.
• One-Take Wonder: The entire My Son, The Folk Singer album was recorded in one go on the afternoon of August 6, 1962, since the spontaneity of the studio audience's reaction would be lost if they did multiple takes. Sherman rehearsed it fairly extensively before the session, however.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Recording and releasing song parodies were still legal gray areas in 1962,^note It was a 1964 court decision involving MAD that established song parodies as being protected under fair use. so Warner (Bros.) Records asked Sherman to restrict the material he parodied on his debut album to songs in the public domain, which meant that he had to write the My Son, The Folk Singer album pretty much from scratch, since he couldn't record any of the Jewish-themed show tune parodies (a collection of material he called Goldeneh Moments from Broadway) that he'd gained a following among the comedy community with. As it happened, they found out after the album was released that "Matilda", the calypso song that "My Zelda" parodied, was still under copyright, and there was a legal scuffle over it.
• Sleeper Hit: As an ethnic humor comedy album by a 38-year-old TV writer and producer whose only previous released work had been two obscure Borscht Belt parody singles recorded a decade earlier, Warner (Bros.) Records only expected My Son, The Folk Singer to sell in the neighborhood of 10,000 or maybe 20,000 copies total upon its release in early October of 1962. Instead, it almost immediately started selling more than 100,000 copies a week, hitting a million sales by the start of December.
• Write What You Know: Fittingly, the man who wrote "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" briefly worked as a summer camp counselor in his college years.